


the things we bury

by darklightflame



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anakin Skywalker Hates Sand, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Rey is a Skywalker (Star Wars), Shmi Skywalker Deserves Better, Tatooine Folklore (Star Wars), That's Not How The Force Works (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29395152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darklightflame/pseuds/darklightflame
Summary: Rey goes to Tatooine to bury the Skywalker lightsabers and learns more about her chosen family's legacy than she expected to
Relationships: Rey & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 6
Kudos: 37





	the things we bury

**Author's Note:**

> anakin has a complicated relationship with the desert, ok. jokes and memes about anakin hating sand are funny until i start overanalyzing them and then this happens.

Tatooine is hotter than Jakku, which isn’t something Rey was expecting to find out on her journey here. She didn’t think having two suns would make _that_ much of a difference, but the sweat drips off of her as she wipes it from her forehead. 

The sand whispers to her. It says her name with a smile and it feels like a memory. The desert always remembers, she knows. It can change in a moment’s notice, leaving no trace of what it left behind, but it always remembers. Even if the wind replaces a generation, the desert will always hold onto the past, buried somewhere, deep in the dunes. Someone has to. 

Luke’s childhood home is covered in sand, half buried by harsh windstorms and years of disuse. People lived here once, and they were happy, and they were sad, and they were angry, and they were _people_ and the desert decided to keep those memories for itself rather than share with the universe. She thinks maybe it’ll want to share with her. 

She hears the voices of generations past, like she’s heard before. Ones she knows, ones she doesn’t, they all call to her. They remind her what it was like to live on Tatooine. They show her everything. 

Most of it is painful.

Luke lived a content, happy life, loved by his aunt and uncle. He grew up with friends, went to school, did his chores, and dreamed of a life outside of Tatooine. But there is something deeper here. A presence left unacknowledged of unspoken happenings that the sand has locked away. 

She doesn’t push. Maybe if she could unbury the pain, she could let it heal. Or maybe some things are better left below ground. 

There is nothing around her. The nearest town is hours away by foot, and she doesn’t want to be here long. She came to do one thing. To remember. And to move on. 

Luke and Leia smile at her, warming her through the Force. She buries their lightsabers beside each other, wrapped in cloth. And then they’re gone.

Someone asks her for her name. A woman in tattered clothes, sand-weary and hunched, with a pack on her shoulder. A citizen of Tatooine, wondering who she knows, who she is. 

She wants more than just the sand to remember. 

“Rey Skywalker,” she says. 

The woman smiles a knowing smile, and she fades into the distance. 

But there’s something else here. The pained presence isn’t gone. The sadness and pain lingers, like the way the dust does in the air, making you feel as though you’re never completely clean. 

The presence materializes, and for a moment she can’t tell if the blue-outlined, translucent human man walking towards her is a desert mirage or if he’s real. 

The ground below her shakes, and Luke’s lightsaber she just buried erupts from beneath the earth and flies into the man’s hands. He stares at it, and he smiles.

He’s a Force ghost, she realizes, although she’s never seen one in person. He’s wearing robes, white and brown, and tall boots, with a gloved hand. His hair matches the color of the sand around him, and curls past his ears, just above his jaw. 

“Who are you?” she asks, unable to gauge his name through the Force. He’s half-hidden, powerful enough to shield like this even after death. And powerful enough to be able to interact with the living world. 

“Rey,” he says. He holds up the lightsaber. “This is mine.”

She’s heard his voice before. On Exegol. He was one of the Jedi she heard, but didn’t know their names. A thousand generations inside of her, and his voice stuck out. 

“That was Luke’s,” she responds. The man’s slight smile fades. He nods. 

“Yes,” he says. “But I made it.”

_This lightsaber was Luke’s and his father’s before him. Now, it calls to you._

_His father._ “You’re Luke’s father,” she says, realizing quickly what that means. “You’re Darth Vader.”

She knows he isn’t, not anymore, and he hasn’t been for a long time, but she likes the way his casual demeanor changes to slightly exasperated when she calls him by his greatest mistake. His shoulders slump a little and he sighs. 

“My name is Anakin,” he says, his voice soft. He doesn’t sound angry or sad. Just accepting. “But yes. I was.”

Was. The darkness is gone. She knows that too. But there’s much she doesn’t. 

“I didn’t…” she realizes, surprised that it never came up. “I didn’t actually know that. Your real name.”

_Anakin. Sky walker. Rain Bringer. Chosen One. Born of the desert but belongs to the stars._

The pain she feels, the hurt that was buried, it’s him. All of it, is his. She knows so much about Luke, but nothing about Anakin. This was his planet too, once. 

He holds the lightsaber out to her, an interesting reversal of a different moment she thought would go very differently. She takes it from him, afraid to brush her hand against his half-spectral one lest he drain her life energy just by virtue of existing. “That’s all right. Some things should stay buried.”

She’s taking on the Skywalker name, now. She wants every part of it. She wants the galaxy to remember everything. For once, she wants the desert to give something _back_. She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Tell me more. I’m a Skywalker now, I’d like to know my family’s history.”

She waves the lightsaber in the air at him. He seems mildly surprised, but he nods. “What would you like to know?”

She sits down in the sand, patting the spot next to her. She’s not having this conversation without being close enough to listen to the desert too. He laughs, and sits next to her. The suns are setting, and she can start to see the stars. “This was your home as well?”

Anakin shakes his head, his eyes slightly vacant. There’s a scar over his right eye she didn’t notice until she was next to him. “I never lived here. When I was three, Gardulla the Hutt lost me and my mother in a bet and we moved to Mos Espa.”

The sand hums beneath her, and Rey sets the lightsaber between the two of them. _Freedom is not guaranteed on Tatooine_ , the sand says. 

“Lost you? What does that mean?”

“When you lose a bet, you generally have to give something away,” he explains, vaguely. She shakes her head. 

“Yes, money, usually. Or a prized possession. Not… people,” she realizes. “Oh. You were… oh.”

Jakku never had slaves. People were unkind, and no one was fair, and life was hard, but no one thought to start using sentient beings as commodity. There was always a line in the sand, even if it was hard to find. 

Anakin huffs in what she thinks might be close to a laugh. He nods. “I don’t remember much of my time with Gardulla, but my mother said Watto was an improvement.”

Rey resists the urge to give the Force ghost a hug. She doesn’t know if it’s possible in the first place, and she’s only just met Anakin. She settles for knocking her shoulder against his lightly enough that he smiles. He has a nice smile. It’s hard to imagine him as the masked dark and dangerous figure the galaxy once feared the most. He looks barely older than herself. 

_He was chosen by—_

The Force repeats a word she doesn’t understand and she knows she’s intruding on a culture she isn’t meant to know. The Force has different names to different peoples, she knows. And here on Tatooine is where the Force came to create its own savior. 

“But you left Tatooine,” she says. “You became a Jedi somehow.”

“The Jedi Order freed me when I was nine,” he says. The sunlight makes his hair look like fire, despite being able to see the sand dunes behind him through it. 

“Just you?” she asks. He nods wistfully. 

“I trained in the Jedi Temple, became a Jedi, was a general during the Clone Wars and then…“ he looks over at her, raising an eyebrow. She knows the rest. But it still doesn’t feel like enough. Anakin is so much different than Luke is in the Force. Maybe it’s because he’s dead, he’s just a ghost, but she can still feel him. His past is part of him, the good and the bad, and he feels more balanced than anything she’s ever felt in her life. 

She reaches out, tentatively, to him, through the Force, and he lets her in. 

It rains. 

The sky opens up above them, suns setting in the distance, but darkness above. She gasps as petrichor fills her nose, the dust around them settling, whispering. 

_Rain bringer_. 

Anakin hasn’t moved nor does he look surprised. He just holds his palm up to the air and the water drips off of him. He grins at it, satisfied with his work. 

When he lets her in, she can feel how truly bright he is. She didn’t think it was possible for a person to feel like a supernova. Only, it doesn’t hurt. It’s just warm. 

The galaxy doesn’t remember, while the desert can never forget. And the desert has a name too— the name of a woman who once pulled the sun out of the sky and raised it as her own, saving the galaxy in the process. 

A headstone reveals itself, a simple gray rock rising from the moistened sand around her. Anakin lowers his hand, letting the dust settle and the rain stop. The suns are almost gone, the last light from the top one fading quickly, but for a moment the name on the stone shines bright, backlit by the sun behind it. 

Shmi Skywalker. 

_Just me_ , he’d said. Not his mother. His mother never left Tatooine. His mother let go of him when he was nine years old and told him not to look back. His mother lived life in slavery, and died only looking to the stars, knowing she’d never live up to the name she held. 

“She died in my arms,” says Anakin, and Rey wipes a tear from her eye without realizing she was crying in the first place. Anakin looks over to her, bringing his thumb to her cheek to wipe another tear away, smiling softly. “Don’t cry, child. Tears are a waste of water on Tatooine.”

Rey laughs, gesturing around her. “But you’re the _rain bringer_ , aren’t you?” she asks. His eyes are soft as his smile fades. He just nods, lowering his hand and looking back to the headstone. In her son’s arms, Shmi Skywalker took her last breath. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “She is of the Force,” he says. He uses a different word. One she doesn’t understand. She thinks she isn’t meant to know what it is, only what it means. “As am I.”

 _Bring back the balance, as I did_. 

They both did. They both brought balance to a galaxy in chaos. All that’s left is peace. He found his, long ago. It’s time for her to find her own. She looks to the lightsaber beside her, lifting it in the air with the Force, letting it hang there until he notices, and he understands. Together, they part the sand below the headstone, lowering the weapon beneath it, so when the desert remembers, it’ll remember them both. 

Anakin takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. It’s growing dark, and colder, but she finds herself not minding when she’s sat next to a star. His mind is scarred, and a battle took place here for too many years, but it’s healed. Flowers have grown where sand and ruined soil used to be. Shmi Skywalker picks one and smiles at her. 

“She would have liked you,” says Anakin. “She would’ve liked that you now have her name.”

The desert is not the only one who will remember Shmi Skywalker. Sand cannot bury things forever. After time, after storms, the wind will uncover things that were never supposed to be covered in the first place. Rey’s just going to help it along a little faster. Something tells her the desert won’t mind. 

Sand isn’t kind. It isn’t smooth, it isn’t calm, it isn’t pleasant, and it permeates your life, choking you until it’s taken everything from you and you’re left gasping for air amidst the things you’ve lost. You try not to cry because it’s a waste of water but the tears come spilling out of you anyways, and the desert doesn’t care.

Rey knows well how much the desert doesn’t care. She knows well what it’s like to lose everything, to be tempted to throw what little she does have away on promises of more, on any way _out_ or _up_ or _away_ from the sands that ensnared her life. She knows what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning in a place where there isn’t even rain. 

Her heart swells with pride to know that Shmi Skywalker would have liked her. Rey would have liked to meet Shmi Skywalker. Maybe one day, when Rey herself becomes one with the Force. She wants to make sure Shmi knows her legacy saved the galaxy twice over. That she knows her legacy escaped the sand dunes and blistering heat and brought the universe balance. 

The galaxy knows the name Skywalker, now, while only the desert remembers Shmi. Rey vows, then, to make sure she takes Shmi off of Tatooine too. 

Anakin whispers his thanks on the wind as he fades and Rey is alone again with a headstone and her own tears. There is healing to be done still, for her, for the Resistance, for the galaxy. The past is the past, and it should stay there, because their future is bright, but as long as the sands of time keep turning, the sands of Tatooine will remember. 

Rey will make sure the galaxy will never forget.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first time posting something i've written lol pls be nice to me im sensitive


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